While many people express a nostalgic wish for a white Christmas, it would be hard to find anyone yearning for a snowy Easter. Yet here in Michigan we have had more than our share of those, too.

And even this year, when the weather of late has turned mild, stubborn stretches of snow still linger on our lawns. Nor is there any guarantee that winter weather is through with us.

Easter lilies will fill area churches even if snow is still on the ground. Easter is not about the weather, but our renewed hope.MLive file photo

After all, it is only the last day of March.

All this might not much matter if the observance of Easter and the coming of spring weren't inextricably linked in the public mind.

But then the changing conditions of spring comprise one of the most powerful symbols of Easter. After all, in the blooming of the flowers and the greening of the land, it's easy to see an object lesson about death, resurrection and the hope for new life.

This is not necessarily a comment on Michigan's harsh, lingering winters, which after all have been less harsh and lingering of late. It's more about the way the timing of the Easter observance is determined.

That timing has always been a mystery of sorts, even for the most faithful and observant believers.

Christmas, as we are constantly reminded by late-year marketers, is a different case. Every year, the countdown is precise. Christmas is fixed, anchored, reliable. We know when Santa Claus is coming to town.

But Easter, as any schoolchild can tell you, is a movable feast. It is not tied to any fixed date. Every year we open the calendar to look for Easter, and every year we find ourselves surprised.

Early in the history of the Christian church, this was a point of controversy, believe it or not. As early as the second century, believers had begun to observe an annual commemorative celebration, and from Rome to Antioch to Ephesus to Alexandria, the rules of the timing were figuratively all over the map. Most communities agreed that Easter should be celebrated after the vernal equinox, or first day of spring. But some insisted on other conditions, such as the passage of the first day of the the Jewish feast of Passover.

Now the rules have been standardized -- Easter is the first Sunday after the Paschal moon, or the first full moon after the ecclesiastical vernal equinox. Got that? In other words, it's the first Sunday after the first full moon after March 21. It can fall on any date from March 22 to April 25.

But even that leaves room for divergence. For example, what if you don't follow the Gregorian calendar, which is used by most of the world? The Orthodox Churches uses the older Julian calendar, which means their observance of Easter, by Gregorian reckoning, might fall on any date between April 4 and May 8. Quite a difference.

What this means is that Easter, for us Westerners, often carries no meteorological object lesson at all. Often it is just a cold, blustery day. As recently as 2008, it arrived on March 23, when spring was just a couple of days old.

But who says this is about climate anyway? After all, hope and despair do not adhere to any calendar or season. Think about Easter Sundays and Holy Weeks through history.

On the day after Easter in 1983, the eyes of the world turned to Cape Canaveral to witness the beginning of a ritual. The space shuttle Challenger made the first of nine successful launches. That string would end in 1986 when, before the eyes of a horrified world, the shuttle would break up in mid-flight and plummet to earth in flames, killing all seven crew members.

In 1991, as the Soviet empire was falling apart, Albania, a former Soviet satellite, held its first multiparty elections on Easter Sunday. The next day the republic of Georgia voted for its independence from the Soviet Union.

In 1995, just three days after Easter, a federal building in Oklahoma City was obliterated by a terrorist bomb, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The next day, a lobbyist in Sacramento, Calif, was assassinated by the Unabomber.

On Easter Sunday in 1996, four days of intertribal massacres finally came to an end in Burundi. Who was looking at the weather then?

And perhaps most notable was Easter Sunday in 1865, when a shocked nation struggled to come to grips with the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, who had died the day before.

There is never any shortage of events to remind us that hope does not depend on seasons or climate. In fact, it's something we find in our principles, or beliefs, our deepest yearnings. And in the case of Easter, no matter what the calendar tells us, it is a matter of enduring faith